The Real Romney (15 page)

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or all the hijinks in the Romney household, there were serious moments, too, and at times moments of friction. Mormonism may have muted the boys’ teenage rebellion, but it wasn’t an antidote entirely. Still, friends and family describe their home life as remarkably harmonious.

Tagg said some of his best childhood memories are of the nights the boys would gather with their parents in the dark and just talk, often on a couch at the foot of Mitt and Ann’s bed. The tradition grew out of the boys’ habit of wandering into their parents’ room in the middle of the night. Over time, the discussion drifted to the evening hours before bedtime, with the darkened room giving everyone license to talk freely. “It was just a time to totally be yourself and completely open up,” Tagg said. Ann and Mitt would offer their advice on whatever someone brought up, and so would the brothers. The tradition would continue as the boys aged, with the points of debate shifting from school to where they would go to college and then, later, to raising children of their own and their careers. Matt, Josh, and Craig would later go into real estate development or management, Tagg would work in private equity, and Ben would become a radiologist.

As Mitt had, Tagg spent his early years idolizing his father. But then he spent part of his adolescence wanting nothing to do with him. His rebellion began when he was young, around age eleven, Tagg said, as his father, in his eyes, went from being “superman” to “supernerd.” “Overnight,” Tagg said, “everything about him bugged me.” The way he wore his jeans so short. The way his hair was never mussed. The way he insisted the boys wake up early on Saturdays for chores. Even the way he said good morning. “It bothered me that he would be so nice about it,” Tagg said.

Family members say Mitt had a tough time dealing with rejection by his oldest son, the only Romney boy to experience this degree of teenage angst. After all, Mitt’s relationship with his own father had not suffered such strain. The tensions lifted after a few years, as Mitt learned to give Tagg more space and Tagg began to regret how he’d been behaving. By the time he was fifteen, the arguments subsided, and Tagg came around to a new appreciation of his father. One night not long after, Tagg was struggling with tremendous peer pressure from friends at school, who were starting to do things he didn’t want to do. Mitt came to his room to ask what was wrong, but Tagg didn’t feel like talking. So Mitt sat there for about two hours, chatting about the Boston Red Sox and waiting for his son to open up. “Finally,” Tagg said, “he asked enough questions and stayed long enough that I felt comfortable in saying what I was feeling.” As for his rebellion, Tagg said, “I matured and understood that he had faults, like anybody. But I did recognize that he was special.”

To Mitt, the special one in the house was Ann, with her wide smile, piercing eyes, and steadying domestic presence. And woe to the boy who forgot it. Tagg said there was one rule that was simply not breakable: “We were not allowed to say anything negative about my mother, talk back to her, do anything that would not be respectful of her.” On Mother’s Day, their home would be fragrant with lilacs, Ann’s favorite flowers. Tagg didn’t get it back then, but he came to understand. From the beginning, Mitt had put Ann on a pedestal and kept her there. “When they were dating,” Tagg said, “he felt like she was way better than him and he was really lucky to have this catch. He really genuinely still feels that way.” What makes his parents’ relationship work, he said, is their distinct characters: Mitt is driven first by reason, while Ann operates more on emotion. “She helps him see there’s stuff beyond the logic, he helps her see that there’s more than just instinct and feeling,” Tagg said. “We’re all a little bit in between the two.”

Mitt and Ann’s relationship would grow and change as their family entered the public eye. But she has remained his chief counselor and confidante, the one person who can lead Mitt to a final decision. Though she did not necessarily offer input on every business deal, friends said, she weighed in on just about everything else. “Mitt’s not going to do something that they don’t feel good about together,” said Mitt’s sister Jane. Tagg said they called their mom “the great Mitt stabilizer.” Ann would later be mocked for her claim that she and Mitt had never had an argument during their marriage, which sounded preposterous to the ears of many married mortals. Tagg said it’s not that his parents never disagree. “I know there are things that she says that he doesn’t agree with sometimes, and I see him kind of bite his tongue. But I know that they go and discuss it in private. He doesn’t ever contradict my mother in public.” Friends of the Romneys back up that account, saying they cannot recall Mitt ever raising his voice toward Ann. In that way, the relationship between Mitt and Ann differed from that of Mitt’s parents. Despite their lifetime of devotion, George and Lenore had no problem airing their disagreements, especially in later years, according to Tagg. “Listen, they fought like cats and dogs,” he said.

Nowhere was Ann’s special status more evident than on long family car trips. Mitt imposed strict rules: they would stop only for gas, and that was the only chance to get food or use the restroom. With one exception, Tagg explained. “As soon as my mom says, ‘I think I need to go to the bathroom,’ he pulls over instantly, and doesn’t complain. ‘Anything for you, Ann.’ ” On one infamous road trip, though, it wasn’t Ann who forced Mitt off the highway.

The destination of this journey, in the summer of 1983, was his parents’ cottage on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron. Mitt would be returning to the place of his most cherished childhood memories. The white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and sons when Mitt climbed behind the wheel to begin the twelve-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario. As with most ventures in his life, he had left little to chance, mapping out the route and planning each stop. Before beginning the drive, Mitt put Seamus, the family’s hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon’s roof rack. He had improvised a windshield for the carrier to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.

Then Romney put his sons on notice: there would be predetermined stops for gas, and that was it. The ride was largely what one would expect with five brothers, ages thirteen and under, packed into a wagon they called the “white whale.” Tagg was commandeering the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, when he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. “Dad!” he yelled. “Gross!” A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours. As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Mitt coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway with the dog still on the roof. It was a preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management. But the story would trail him years later on the national political stage, where the name Seamus would become shorthand for Romney’s coldly clinical approach to problem solving.

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f Romney is exceedingly comfortable around family and close friends, he’s much less so around those he doesn’t know well, drawing a boundary that’s difficult to traverse. It’s a strict social order—us and them—that has put coworkers, political aides, casual acquaintances, and others in his professional circles, even people who have worked with or known him for years, outside the bubble. As a result, he has numerous admirers but, by several accounts, not a long list of close pals. “He’s very engaging and charming in a small group of friends he’s comfortable with,” said one former aide. “When he’s with people he doesn’t know, he gets more formal. And if it’s a political thing where he doesn’t know anybody, he has a mask.” For those outside the inner circle, Romney comes across as all business. Colleagues at work or political staffers are there to do a job, not to bond. He has little patience for idle chatter or small talk, little interest in mingling at cocktail parties, at social functions, or even in a crowded hallway. He is not fed by, and does not crave, casual social interaction, often displaying little desire to know who people are and what makes them tick. “He wasn’t overly interested in people’s personal details or their kids or spouses or team building or their career path,” said another former aide. “It was all very friendly but not very deep.” Or, as one fellow Republican put it, “He has that invisible wall between ‘me’ and ‘you.’ ”

This sense of detachment is a function partly of his faith, which has its own tight social community that most outsiders don’t see. Indeed, the stories of Romney’s humanity and warmth come mostly from people who know him as a fellow Mormon. His abstention from drinking also makes parties and other alcohol-fueled functions distinctly less appealing. He is the antithesis of the gregarious pol with a highball in one hand and cigar in his mouth, offering a colorful dose of political lore under a dim bar light. When he does have to show his face after dark at nonchurch social events, his visits can last a half hour or less. For the Romneys, who became known as generous dinner hosts, especially for newcomers to the area, their home has long been a preferred social setting.

Romney’s discomfort around strangers would later become more than just a curiosity; it would be an impediment on the campaign trail. Lacking an easy rapport with voters, he would come across as aloof, even off-putting. “A lot of it is, he is patrician. He just is. He has lived a charmed life,” said one former aide. “It is a big challenge that he has, connecting to folks who haven’t swum in the same rarefied waters that he has.” His growing wealth, the deeper he got into his career, only widened the disconnect. At the time of the now-legendary road trip with Seamus, Romney was already on his way to a new, and spectacularly lucrative, phase in his career. He was about to take over a new enterprise in private equity called Bain Capital. The idea was to buy or take a controlling stake in companies, retool them with Bain’s analytical expertise, and then sell them at a profit. The venture would, in the latter part of the 1980s and into the 1990s, bring in millions of dollars for Romney and his partners. As a result, his family, already financially comfortable, was entering an entirely new social class: they were rich.

After seven years on the East Coast, they had moved from a modest three-bedroom home in Belmont to a handsome natural-shingle house with white trim on a big corner lot near the private Belmont Hill School, which all five boys would attend. Then, in 1989, Mitt and Ann allowed their first bout of conspicuous spending, plunking down $1.25 million for a stately Colonial on nearly two and a half acres up the road, enlarging and renovating it, and installing a pool and tennis court. At the time, Tagg was in France on his Mormon mission. After his parents sent him a photo, he asked his father, “How can you afford that house?” The family’s modest getaway on Cape Cod gave way, in 1997, to a stunning waterfront retreat on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. They would also purchase a sprawling ski retreat in the mountains of Park City, Utah, and an oceanfront home on the Pacific coast north of downtown San Diego, California. Mitt was wealthy to a degree well beyond what his parents had ever been.

Romney acknowledged in 1994 that his good fortune afforded them a lifestyle few could reach, one that allowed Ann to stay home without a second thought. “I tell my kids, ‘We won the lottery. Don’t think this is normal. Don’t think that your life will have the kind of plenty that ours has had,’ ” he said. Still, the Romney boys had no idea how much their dad was truly worth. Perhaps that’s because Mitt eschewed many of the trappings of wealth. The family had no cook or full-time maid. His sons urged him to buy a luxury car, but he refused, continuing to drive a dented Chevy Caprice Classic nicknamed the Gray Grunt. And he was frugal to the core, wearing winter gloves patched with duct tape and cracking down on anyone in the house who left the water running or the lights on.

They did join the Belmont Hill Club, a small private tennis and swimming club near their home. Ann got to be a good tennis player; Mitt less so. “I sometimes thought God put him on Earth so I could beat him six-love,” said Joseph J. O’Donnell, a longtime friend and neighbor from Belmont. Mitt compensated on the tennis court with skills he did possess: strategic thinking and gamesmanship. “His strategy is simply to hit the ball back one more time than you do,” Wright said. “He would encourage me—‘John, hit it harder, hit it harder’—trying to get me to hit it out.”

Even as he began shouldering more responsibility at Bain, Romney would assume several leadership positions in the Mormon church. But he could handle it. “Mitt,” said Kem Gardner, a fellow church official from this period, “just had the capacity to keep all the balls up in the air.” Or, as Tagg put it, “Compared to my dad, everyone’s lazy.” Helen Claire Sievers, who served in a church leadership position under Romney, got a glimpse of his work habits during weekend bus trips to the Mormon temple near Washington, D.C. Church groups would leave late on a Friday, drive all night, and arrive early on Saturday morning. Then they’d spend all day Saturday in temple sessions before turning around and driving home, to be back by Sunday morning. It was a grueling itinerary, Sievers said, so everyone used the time on the bus to sleep or read quietly. Everyone but Romney. “Mitt was always working. His light was on,” she said. “He was taking advantage of every moment.” Similarly telling was the time the Romneys were renovating their Belmont house before moving in. Romney had asked Grant Bennett to meet him at the new home to review church business. Bennett thought it was strange, knowing the family wasn’t in the house yet. When Bennett showed up, Romney pried open a large storage container on the property. Inside, in front of a heap of their belongings, Romney had created a makeshift office with his desk, a chair, and his papers. “He opened it and sat down and worked,” Bennett recalled. If Romney’s drive was legendary, so was his conspicuous caution. Years before he launched his first political campaign, Romney sensed that he would, like his father, enter public life. John Wright remembered an instance early on in Mitt’s professional career when he and Mitt had been approached by a businessman who wanted them to invest in some real estate deals. There was nothing illegal about them, Wright said, but they seemed unsavory enough that Mitt balked. “He said, ‘If I ever ran for office, that’s not something that I would want people to know about.’ ”